“Really?” asked Sherwood in polite disbelief.
“I had the audio app on my phone off,” Warren interrupted him. “I have no idea why the car decided to connect to my phone and pull up a book.”
Sherwood’s eyebrows climbed up his face. “That, my friend, is a lie,” he said, sounding delighted.
Warren sighed. “Let me tell you about my car.”
13
MercyThe first time I woke up, I was so cold my whole body felt as though I was burning—a feeling that originated at my shoulder and boiled through my body down to my toes. My head hurt so much I wouldn’t have been surprised to find I was bleeding out of my ears.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
When the Soul Taker had altered me in October, all that I had to do was look at someone and I saw…everything, I suppose, if I’d been fool to look long enough. That had been terrible and frightening, but it had gone away when Zee had destroyed the artifact.
I knew that the creature (Garmr—I knew it was Garmr) was not feeding upon my physical body. He was reopening the channel the Soul Taker had woven using my magic—magic that was divine in nature because my father was Coyote—and my soul to force my mind to do something that it was not made to do.
In my hands, the magic of the walking stick tried to save me. But it was not a thing of soul, like Garmr was. It was not able to do much more than keep my hands warm. But that might be enough to keep Garmr from killing me.
He wanted to kill me—but help was coming.
I could feel them.
The second time I woke up, I was still cold. Someone was carrying me. I ignored that, because it wasn’t the most important thing—and if I thought about the stranger carrying me, I would get distracted. I couldn’t afford to get distracted.
This was important.
What had the frost giant promised me as we groomed the horses?
Doing the right thing doesn’t mean no one gets hurt. I understood, now, that he hadn’t been speaking about my brother, or not only about my brother. He’d been speaking about what he intended to do to me after it had been clear to him that I was not going to find the artifact before the solstice with the tools I had available to me.
I will do anything in my power to help you find it.
Hrímnir had known what the Soul Taker had done to me. He knew that the ability was still inside me, despite all that I had done to close it off. And he’d had the perfect tool to rip it open again.
Because he’d turned Garmr into something very like the hungry ghost—a creature of soul, spirit, and magic—while Garmr’s physicality was otherwise engaged.
And I knew all that because Hrímnir was watching us. And I could see—
I shivered and the motion was enough to distract me, and I could no longer hold on to the flood of information rolling by me too fast to catch or make sense of. I understood why the Soul Taker’s priest in Hrímnir’s story had gouged out his eyes in an attempt to stop this.
I don’t think it could have helped much, because my eyes were shut.
The third time I woke up, I was warm. My head still hurt, but I was getting used to that. The air I breathed in smelled like Adam, and the frost giant’s overwhelming presence was gone. It didn’t help as much as I might have hoped.
I was on a bed wrapped in a blanket. My face was buried against Adam’s hip, one arm wrapped around his leg, the other around his back. He was sitting mostly upright, pillows at his back and his shoulders against the headboard. Adam wouldn’t lie down with me vulnerable and a stranger in the room.
And there were strangers in the room.
I used the familiar scent of my mate to anchor myself, focusing on Adam and using him as a barrier to hide behind. When that worked, more or less, I seized the ties between my mate and me—pack and mate bonds.
I kept those bonds tightly shut. I didn’t want the information that was flooding my head to also flood the channels between us. I didn’t know what it would do to my mate and the pack. But I held on to them tightly, wrapping them metaphorically—and that was how my magic worked best—around my wrists as an anchor.
My head felt like a calculator that someone had managed to download the entire Internet onto. I might have managed to survive with the damage the Soul Taker had done—but I didn’t think that I could function like this for long. Something was going to give out—my heart, my head.
But Hrímnir had given this to me as a gift—and it was a gift, no matter the cost to me.
Without Hrímnir’s gift, I would not have been able to find the artifact—and I knew where it was. But I don’t think the frost giant had meant me to be this helpless—I couldn’t even bear to open my eyes for fear of what I might see.
I had this one chance to save the world. I breathed a little deeper, taking my mate’s scent into my body. I had this one chance to save Adam.
I would have to be very careful to make use of this gift. To do that—I needed to hide what had been done to me. For just a little while, I had to pretend to be normal.
“I left my rental and luggage at a gas station in Bonners Ferry,” said an unfamiliar male voice. “When it became obvious the roads were impassable, I came the rest of the way as the stag.”
“Dangerous to travel that far,” Liam said, with what sounded like disapproval.
Liam was old. He’d done a lot of things I didn’t want to know about. His devotion to Zane was fed by his ties to the Great Spell in a way that made him a servant, exactly as a vampire’s sheep are servants of the vampire they feed. But a vampire’s sheep weren’t usually powerful fae lords. The twist that made Liam serve rather than host felt like a punishment, like he’d done something to merit his fate.
I didn’t want to know what he’d done or what had been done to him—though it involved screaming. Happily, before I was drawn further into who and what Liam was, the stranger spoke again.
“I didn’t have much choice,” countered the first man. He didn’t sound defensive. “It wasn’t likely I’d meet anyone in this storm.”
The groom was here. Zane Heddar.
I didn’t need to look at him to know him.
Zane’s self didn’t hurt me as much as Liam’s. Zane had never been a mass murderer or a torturer. Or even a killer. But he was painful in another way.
Zane held his ancestors inside him, bearing the burden of the memories of every man in his family who had been one of the grooms for the Great Spell over the centuries. He knew their names, had access to their memories. If I wasn’t careful, I might get lost in those memories.
Zane understood the nature of the Great Spell in a way necessary to its survival. He’d been born with the understanding of his destiny, and it had shaped his life. There were so many people in his head, I wondered that he could function at all.
I had a vision of a five-year-old Zane standing on the railing of a balcony that was on some sort of skyscraper. I could see the other tall buildings around him; a few were higher, but he could look down on most of the city. I knew that he was deciding if he should jump or not. If he jumped, would his parents be forced to have another child? Someone else who would have to bear the weight of their ancestors? Then that chance was over, his nanny wrapping her arms around him and pulling him off the railing. She was shaking and crying.
“Meeting someone would be dangerous?” someone asked—and I realized it was me. And that I was asking why Zane and Liam both thought that him running around in the storm was dangerous for other people.